M3 Ultra LLM benchmark

Community folklore on M3 Ultra

13 unverified claims extracted from Reddit/HN comments. Lower trust than signed runs above; every row links to the source.

• communityconfidence 70%

  18.50tok/s — Qwen3-Coder on M3 Ultra via mlx

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · Qwen3-Coder

  “m3 ultra with lmstudio-community/Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct-MLX-6bit 256k context len 18.50 token/s 1000 tokens first token 12.44 s”

  source: Reddit · u/EnvironmentalMath660 · 2025-07-24

• communityconfidence 70%

  65.00tok/s — Qwen3-Coder-Next on M3 Ultra via vllm-mlx 6-bit

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · Qwen3-Coder-Next

  “Benchmarks (Mac Studio M3 Ultra, 256GB): Qwen3-Coder-Next-6bit (80B MoE, 3B active): - Decode: 65 tok/s”

  source: HN · u/raullen · 2026-02-26

• communityconfidence 60%

  18.43tok/s — DeepSeek R1 on M3 Ultra via mlx

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · DeepSeek R1

  “R1 671B Q4 - M3 Ultra 512GB with MLX🔥 Yes it works! First test, and I'm blown away! Prompt: "Create an amazing animation using p5js" * **18.43 tokens/sec** * Generates a p5js zero-shot, tested at video's end * Video in real-time, no acceleration! https://reddit.com/link/1j9vj…”

  source: Reddit · u/ifioravanti · 2025-03-12

• communityconfidence 60%

  145.0tok/s — Llama 3.3 70b on M3 Ultra via lm-studio

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · Llama 3.3 70b

  “it so far. Prompt processing is not too bad for 70b models -- with about 7800 tokens of context, 8 bit MLX Llama 3.3 70b processes at about 145 t/s per second - and then in LM studio does not need to process for additional prompts, as it caches the context, assuming you're not ch…”

  source: Reddit · u/nomorebuttsplz · 2025-03-18

• communityconfidence 60%

  51.47tok/s — GPT-OSS-120B on M3 Ultra via lm-studio

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · GPT-OSS-120B

  “-120B MLX I'm getting: Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 80 core GPU, 256GB RAM Application: LM Studio Reasoning effort set to High. I'm getting 51.47 tokens/second!”

  source: Reddit · u/EricTheRed123 · 2025-08-06

• communityconfidence 60%

  20.00tok/s — Qwen3-Coder-Next on M3 Ultra via vllm

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · Qwen3-Coder-Next

  “|Quant|RAM|Decode|Prefill|TTFT (cache hit)| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |**4bit (mxfp4)**|\~60GB|33-38 tok/s|\~1500 tok/s|0.3s| |**8bit**|\~122GB|16-20 tok/s|\~300-550 tok/s|1-2s| 4-bit is the sweet spot for this model — decode speed is identical (memory bandwidth limited on MoE), but pref…”

  source: Reddit · u/Striking-Swim6702 · 2026-02-26

• communityconfidence 60%

  38.00tok/s — Qwen3-Coder-Next on M3 Ultra via vllm

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · Qwen3-Coder-Next

  “GB) # Qwen3.5-122B-A10B (MoE, 10B active params) |Quant|RAM|Decode|Prefill|TTFT (cache hit)| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |**4bit (mxfp4)**|\~60GB|33-38 tok/s|\~1500 tok/s|0.3s| |**8bit**|\~122GB|16-20 tok/s|\~300-550 tok/s|1-2s| 4-bit is the sweet spot for this model — decode speed is id…”

  source: Reddit · u/Striking-Swim6702 · 2026-02-26

• communityconfidence 60%

  65.00tok/s — Qwen3-Coder-Next on M3 Ultra via vllm

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · Qwen3-Coder-Next

  “Qwen3-Coder-Next at 65 tok/s on M3 Ultra — with working tool calling for OpenClaw I've been running local coding agents on my Mac Studio (M3 Ultra 256GB) for the past”

  source: Reddit · u/Striking-Swim6702 · 2026-02-26

• communityconfidence 60%

  58.70tok/s — Qwen3-Coder-Next on M3 Ultra via lm-studio

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · Qwen3-Coder-Next

  “done<p>As of v0.2.0: Vision-Language Model support with the same tiered caching<p>Benchmarks on M3 Ultra 512GB with Qwen3-Coder-Next-8bit: 58.7 tok/s single request, 243 tok/s at 8x batch. Full results on the README.<p>It reuses LM Studio's model directory, so you don't need to r…”

  source: HN · u/jundot · 2026-03-04

• communityconfidence 60%

  100.0tok/s — DeepSeek-R1 on M3 Ultra via ollama

  our signed data: M3 Ultra · DeepSeek-R1

  “Speed-wise, MLX's unified memory means zero CPU↔GPU copies. On an M3 Ultra: Qwen3.5-9B hits 108 tok/s (vs ~41 on Ollama), Qwen 3.6 35B does 100 tok/s with only 3B active params.<p>The full benchmark data is in the README. Happy to discuss the MLX performance characteristics or to…”

  source: HN · u/raullen · 2026-04-18

See all 13 claims for M3 Ultra →

Which models can an M3 Ultra run?

Fastest decode speed for each model on this hardware, from llm-speed's own runs and community-submitted runs. Each page lists every quant and runtime and labels which runs llm-speed measured.

• Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 · 112.5 tok/s
• Qwen3 32B · 34.4 tok/s
• Qwen3 0.6B · 429.2 tok/s
• stable-code-instruct 3B · 192.5 tok/s
• Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 · 182.7 tok/s
• DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite 16B · 168.3 tok/s
• gpt-oss-20b · 152.7 tok/s
• Qwen2.5 7B · 139.6 tok/s
• Qwen2.5-Coder 7B · 138.6 tok/s
• Llama-3.1 8B · 130.2 tok/s

Models measured on M3 Ultra

• Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-4bit benchmarks
• DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B-MLX-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen3-8B-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen3-0.6B-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct-MLX-4bit benchmarks
• qwen2.5-72b-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• llama-3.3-70b-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• stable-code-instruct-3b-4bit benchmarks
• Yi-Coder-9B-Chat-4bit benchmarks
• starcoder2-15b-4bit benchmarks
• granite-8b-code-instruct-4bit benchmarks
• Codestral-22B-v0.1-4bit benchmarks
• DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen2.5-Coder-14B-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• gpt-oss-20b-MXFP4-Q4 benchmarks
• Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen3-32B-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• gemma-2-9b-it-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• phi-4-4bit benchmarks
• Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-4bit benchmarks
• Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-4bit benchmarks